site banner
naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   32097 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 16, 2023

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

13
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

LEDs aren't strictly superior to good incandescent light sources. At their peak, in the last few years, they are competitive. I don't mean longevity or efficiency or safety, they certainly beat the hell out of previous technologies in these terms. I mean color rendering index, smoothness of the emission spectrum (most importantly the prominence of blue peak) and flicker-free luminance – properties that make for comfortable, natural light. CRI is defined as a fraction of color rendering that an incandescent gives. There's a nice Russian website with a database of those and other measurements, creatively called lamptest.ru. The best LEDs have CRI=99. Cheap ones are more like 93 now, and 80 yesterday.

Incidentally, office-tier fluorescents could go as low as 60-something.

There are alternative measures and some debate, of course, but the gist is this: sometimes you walk into a store or an exhibition or some other venue where electricity cost is an afterthought, or just a bitter clinger old-timer's home, and you notice that it's easy to see things, even though the nominal luminous power is weak and tinged with yellow. That's because there are powerful incandescent and probably halogen lights installed, and your retina is hit with continuous color gradients it had evolved for. It's almost as pleasant as sunlight, and as bittersweet as a scent bringing back childhood memories.

It's like wireless earbuds or earphones. Sure, after trying out a decent pair, you wouldn't want to get back to tangled cables and the microphone effect and the need to lug the audio source around. But every once in a while you plug in your electrostatic planars into an amp, or just 4BA+DD buds into an old laptop –and remember what it was like before convenience outweighed the taste for fidelity one could mistake for snobbish pretense.

Or one could think about our computers, and their embarrassing latency despite undeniable improvement in computing power.

Grandpa might still remember the thing with transistor radios and what they had superseded.

And so it goes all the way to Socrates and his warning against committing knowledge to written medium, that gets in the way of learning by heart – which in his mind was identical with true understanding, and it's frankly pretty compelling once you think about the compromise inherent in retrieval transformers.

I'm not sure if people had voiced the same opposition to speech.

But I digress. In exchange for convenience, we grow used to a slightly inferior experience at the core of the activity, some accidental detail that made it wonderful, and stop noticing it, and begin to find it amusing that some eccentrics still fiddle with the obsolete. The experience of few such transitions may be what makes people so averse to accept the next new thing, even when it is plainly superior across the board.

I had a 300 (or was it 600 ) watt ‘deckenfluter’ – “ceiling flooder” – in my old room and it felt amazing, warm and clear. You could do anything. The night was powerless, you kept your own hours. The friend who recommended it had a theory that people don’t read because they lack light. The halogen bulbs are now banned here.

You can get very close in subjective comfort by going overboard with very good LEDs (and I think that, if assisted by like 100W of halogen, it'll be perfect). Last time I was in a position to bother, I bought these bad boys. CRI of 97, 5753K color temp (so, daylight but not yet annoyingly bluish), 4128 Lumen per 38.6W. The problem is they're humongous and won't fit into normal chandeliers, so you'll need to hack together some diffusor because those spot LEDs are annoying and bad for the eyes (and you'll lose some performance with the diffusor absorbing light, naturally). But it's nothing a visit to a hardware store and half an hour of tinkering won't solve. If I owned a home office, I'd have installed such a lamp on every square meter of the ceiling (or, actually, I'd have substituted some for low-temp equivalents). You can get a great deal of light from ~300W of power with these things. 33K Lumen, in fact. Allowing for 20% losses, that's 26K... in a modest 15 sq m room it'd get you close to a normal overcast day.

LED strips can be even better, but they're even more fiddly. This "DIY" corn lamp, too, is obviously assembled from normal Aliexpress components and strips.

I surmise there must be Youtube guides to do much better than that.

Where do I find an illegal incandescent bulb dealer?

Don't buy illegal light bulbs, buy 100w heating elements with e27 socket that glow when used.

I've seen them in Chinese junk shops. The one I bought exploded the glass off the connector (in one piece at least...) pretty quickly though.

Feed stores.

Halogens are still widely available. I bought some at Walmart last month.

Have you tried looking in dark alleys?

Shouldn't one look in a bright one or is that where you find the halogen dealers?

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats